Bob Hope on TV: Thanks for the Video Memories

Preface

The numbers stunned the industry.

The 46.6 rating meant that nearly half of all homes in America with TV sets were watching. That’s counting ones not using watching TV at the time too. And the 64 share meant that of all homes that did have their TVs on, nearly two-thirds of them were viewing this show.

The only shows that scored higher numbers than these were special events that aired on all the TV networks without commercials, like the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 and men walking on the moon in 1969. In contrast, this was just an entertainment program airing on one network on Jan. 15, 1970.

The show was Chrysler Presents The Bob Hope Christmas Special: Around the World with the USO, although most people including those in the industry referred to it as The Bob Hope Christmas Special. Its star had been a featured attraction for the NBC television network for twenty years and on NBC radio for more than ten years before that. And while Bob Hope certainly was well loved by the American public, no one had predicted this would be the highest-rated entertainment show in the medium’s history up to that point.

One reason was competition. At the time, TV viewers could only choose between NBC, ABC and CBS in most markets (as well as noncommercial public television and a few independent stations in bigger markets, but the effects of those were negligible in the national ratings). On the night The Bob Hope Christmas Special aired, Bewitched on ABC was that network’s top situation comedy, while The Jim Nabors Hour on CBS was a prime ratings contender as well, usually in the top thirty. This time slot looked like an imposing position for Bob to get a large audience.

Another was the show’s content. This was the sixth annual visit Bob made to provide live entertainment via the United States Organizations, better known as the USO, to troops in the ongoing Vietnam War, which continued to be unpopular back home. There was every reason to suspect people were fatiguing of just the mention of the bloody conflict, which seemed to have no end in sight.

Then there was the guest list. Sure, Neil Armstrong was the first man on the moon just a few months earlier, but he had been interviewed and seen on TV previously. Teresa Graves was a regular on TV’s number one series, Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In, but not its star attraction. It had been at least three years since singer/actress Connie Stevens had done a movie and longer than that for a regular TV series or hit record, while foreign actress Romy Schneider was largely unknown to most Americans. As for the Piero Brothers and Miss World Eva Rueber-Staier, they were as obscure then as they are now.

Yet Bob — who was executive producer as well as star of his show, a rarity among TV comedians — had crafted a show designed to attract eyeballs in spite of its perceived obstacles. He made a special performance before President Richard Nixon in December 1969 to kick off his overseas tour, which gained the project free advance publicity, and designed the trek to go throughout the world to glamour spots like Berlin and Rome, not just in Vietnam. Bob also did his customary promotion of the show in advance of its airing on TV talk and news shows. And he was on a roll too, as seven of his nine specials during the 1969-1970 television season, including this one, ranked among the top eleven specials of the year. He clearly was tapping into America’s desire to laugh amid bad news with a familiar, comforting face.

For Bob, this ratings landmark was something of a bittersweet accomplishment. On the positive side, it confirmed his status as a leading entertainer as he was nearly in his seventies, an impressive accomplishment in the increasingly youth-obsessed world of show business. While most of his contemporaries were retired or scrambling for work, Bob was assured of his place in television.

It also showed that he remained popular with the younger generation of soldiers, even though many were the sons of men he had entertained first in World War II. Going to see Bob perform was a big deal to many of them, including future astronaut Guion Bluford. I was in Cameron Bay in Vietnam in 1966, 1967, he says. Bob did a Vietnam tour, he came on Cameron Bay there, and I saw him briefly in camp, but unfortunately I couldn’t see his show because I was a fighter pilot on alert duty. I had to be ready to scramble F-4s if needed. I missed the program, which pissed me off, but that’s life. He had no idea that he would later appear on one of Bob’s specials as a guest in 1983.

The success also gave Bob favorable media coverage after months of unprecedented negative headlines for someone who consistently ranked as one of the most-loved entertainers in America. For one, reports came out that Bob had his regular stable of writers provide jokes for Vice President Spiro Agnew to bolster the latter’s combative public image, calling into question Bob’s proclaimed apolitical approach to comedy.

He also felt so upset for what he thought was inaccurate reporting of the Vietnam War that he took the unprecedented step of opening the gated doors to his home in Toluca Lake, California, on Nov. 12, 1969, to hold a press conference. Bob called out his home network’s division of NBC News in particular to claim its stories about racial disparities in treatment of combat soldiers was wrong. Such defenses about what was occurring in Vietnam led some to label Bob a warmonger.

There were some that say he was a hawk during the war, and I don’t believe that, says Gene Perret, who wrote for Bob from the 1970s through 1990s. His feeling was ‘These guys are over there, fighting there for our country.’ It was in support of people who were as much a victim as anyone else.

The ratings also were vindication for most of Hope’s writers of the time, almost all of whom had been with him for at least a decade, usually more than that, and whose contributions Bob relied on extensively for the special. Lester White began writing for Hope when the latter was in vaudeville. When Bob went into radio full time in 1937, Norman Sullivan joined him and worked only on his monologues. Mort Lachman, who would direct the overseas Christmas specials as well as produce Bob’s specials overall starting in 1964, started doing Bob’s radio show in the 1940s.

Others joined Hope during the early 1950s on TV, including Lachman’s writing partner Bill Larkin and British-born Charlie Lee, who wrote solo until paired in 1964 with occasional contributor turned regular writer Gig Henry. Lester White’s writing partner had been Johnny Rapp for at least fifteen years until 1968, when Lester worked a year with Larry Rhine and then Mel Tolkin effective the fall of 1969.

Tolkin described his activities for Bob to Tom Stempel in Storytellers to the Nation: A History of American Television Writing thusly: You work not only for his specials, you work for his gigs, his trips to Vietnam and Korea. You work on dinners, gigs in honor of somebody, charity gigs. Wherever he is, we get a poop sheet that we write jokes [from], who’s on the dais, something about the man being honored, the occasion, areas for comedy…and of course the poop about the places, Vietnam and Korea, the temperature, the animals around, what the soldiers eat, where they hang out.

Despite having such insights provided, the writers’ gag lines on the special did not always pan out. Bob found mixed reception at best to jokes about the new draft lottery system and the Paris peace talks. Clearly, the rank and file were sick of hearing about the progress of the war — or the lack of it — as much as being part of it.

In addition, Bob faced the toughest reception he ever encountered among usually friendly soldiers watching the performances before and during Christmas in 1969 (Bob and crew edited footage from several shows filmed along with visits with officials for use in the annual specials). The worst was in Lai Khe, where soldiers booed him heartily for saying President Nixon would bring them home soon and kept doing so as he brought out other performers on stage with him. It took Connie Stevens singing Silent Night to calm everyone down finally.

Indeed, for the performers joining Bob on his Vietnam shows, it was not a glamourous excursion. It was very intense, because we went around the world in two weeks, and one woman came off the plane in a stretcher at the end, notes Gloria Loring, who toured with Bob in Christmas of 1970. She herself got so sick at one point that In Thailand, when they were going to do a canal tour, I couldn’t even raise my head off my pillow. Per Bob, they had to visit the wounded as part of their itinerary. Going to the hospital ships, that was heartbreaking, Loring says.

Yet in spite of all the inconveniences — including having to ride in a cavernous C-130 aircraft she says troupe members nicknamed the pregnant duck — Loring was proud to do the show even for a war that was unpopular. She says her mindset was, This is not about politics, this is about men and women who’ve served our country, and it’s the least I can do. Being there was an extraordinary honor, and so memorable. It was an honor and a pleasure to be part of his special.

Bob also had faced personal tragedy prior to the 1969 trip. His oldest and youngest brother died within a week of each other in June 1969. The youngest, George Hope, had been production coordinator for Bob’s specials until he died of cancer at age fifty-nine.

Indeed, it had been a tumultuous year for Bob prior to this show, starting with his previous Christmas special on Jan. 16, 1969, which had a very high rating itself (38.5) and featured a lot of famous names popping up announced during the trek to Vietnam. These included actor Roger Smith (husband of Ann-Margret, the show’s featured guest star); another USO entourage led by Johnny Grant with actresses Carolyn Devore, Sherry Alberoni, Monica Peterson, and Brenda Dickson; and most shockingly to modern viewers Adm. James S. McCain, whose son John McCain was a Naval flyer shot down over Hanoi and taken as a war prisoner. Everybody pays in this conflict, Hope grimly states in recounting the facts on the special. John McCain would be released in 1973 and later become a U.S. Senator for Arizona and the 2008 Republican candidate for president.

Bob’s son Kelly also appears when Bob entertains wounded warriors at the tour’s start in Japan. When everyone returns, California Gov. Ronald Reagan and his wife, Nancy Reagan, greets them along with Bob’s wife Delores. It is so star-studded one nearly forgets that the war remained very unpopular at home.

As for his part, Bob is in fine form and even able to ad-lib well. For example, when it rains heavily on one stage, he mockingly asks, Where’s Billy Graham when you need him? Playing often on his cowardly image there, he notes, I carry a cross, a St. Christopher medal and a Star of David. When I go, I’m gonna blame everybody!

Bob got nearly as a high rating (34.9) for his next special on Feb. 17, 1969, but his performance was not as strong, as usually was the case with his shows taped in a studio. He does have a clever opening joke of I think it’s a big break for us following the program our president got his start on, referring to President Richard Nixon’s cameo on Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In, which leads into this special. But the rest of his monologue was forgettable, and Bob used the vaudeville setup of program to let his guest carry more of the show than himself.

For example, Diana Ross and the Supremes get to sing not their usual one but two songs here, Cornet Man in shimmering gowns and Sam You Made the Pants Too Long in hobo outfits. Later Diana has a solo number, My Man, which like the other two was first popularized by Barbra Streisand. To his credit, Bob comes out and wraps his arms around her to sing and dance with her, displaying a form of interracial affection previously taboo on television, but he undercuts the romantic mood by crooning several tunes about himself, like I’m So Pretty.

His next special on March 19, 1969, is more typical of what was great about Hope on TV and what often disappointed. On the plus side was his annual grousing about not getting a nod for the Academy Awards. The Oscar nominations are out, so I know what I’m giving up for Lent, he begins and adds, I never thought the day would come that I would wish I was Rosemary’s Baby. Bob humorously follows it up by comparing himself to Best Actress nominee Barbra Streisand in the proboscis department (his has been most often called ski-sloped): "Six nominations for Funny Girl and none for me — is it my fault because my nose took the wrong off ramp?"

On the downside, Bob makes a joke involving Phyllis Diller’s looks that was one of his tired go-to ploys to imply ugliness. He also promoted another of his pictures (How to Commit Marriage), which is common practice for him, but what makes the plugging irritating this time is his moralizing joke of It’s a new concept in films. We all wear clothes.

Worst of all is his sexist jokes about a recent development at the Santa Anita Park racetrack in California: A girl jockey won a race. Imagine that, girl jockeys! It’ll certainly going to make the daily double a lot more interesting. I guess they’ve been accepted. The racing form now has a centerfold. He then implies that the horse thought the jockey was a man in drag and throws in another dated gender stereotype with The other day at Santa Anita, the announcer yelled, ‘They’re off.’ And the girl jockey wouldn’t come out of the gate. This sort of material would peg Bob as old-fashioned and even reactionary among younger viewers, but nevertheless he kept doing material in the same vein for more than a decade afterward.

He got even more political on his season ender on April 17, 1969, only half-joking railing against certain members of the younger generation. I was going to spend my vacation laying around Palm Springs, but it’s going to pot…Ten thousand hippies invaded the desert, and the gophers went crazy. The first time they ever smelled grass! Once again, he came off as a little square by citing the permissiveness in films as part of his routine. They were even dancing in the nude, but the cops didn’t do anything. They thought it was just another movie company on location. He threw in a little xenophobia to conclude it with The Indians got mad at the hippies because they couldn’t tell which ones were the squaws. Until they took their clothes off. Still they weren’t sure.

Later in that same show, Bob introduces Sergio Mendes by noting that his unique and delightful sound is such a change, a pleasant change, from the dissonance that passes for music today. When did Bob become a music critic, and why should his opinion on it matter? He is not helping his case of a being a contemporary authority in the field by booking on the same show singer Patti Page, who had not had a hit in four years and would never make the pop charts again.

At the end of the show, Bob praises recently deceased former President Dwight Eisenhower and feels compelled to drop in the following: In the last few years, our problems at home puzzled him a lot, because he was a man of discipline. And he couldn’t understand citizens of this country who were reckless with their responsibilities. It was another swipe implied at those against the Establishment, and it was totally unnecessary.

Bob returns five months later and garners an impressive 31.9 rating, in part because it uses the format of Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In and even includes that show’s stars in cameos. Clearly, and somewhat frustratingly, Bob was following trends on TV rather than setting them. He is both sentimental in a funny way about his long career (When I started, NBC had a crystal set and a peacock egg. I sang on one and sat on the other.) while still being dismissive of the youth protest movement. Discussing the Woodstock rock concert, Bob quips, When the cows got through eating the grass that was thrown away on the grass, they were so high, you had to climb a ladder to milk them…Some of the hippies tore off their clothes but they weren’t arrested. They were still wearing a layer of dirt.

Still, Bob does try to keep things current and clever, so he employs Tom and Dick Smothers in inserts, watching the show and commenting on its theme of censorship. At one point, they wonder why they are no longer on network TV and muse maybe they’ll be the summer replacement for Hee Haw, which actually was their summer replacement in 1969. It is smart comedy, but unfortunately it is paired with bits like Jack Carter and Soupy Sales playing astronauts about to stand on the moon. It’s not as bad as Burbank! Jack exclaims before they find a 40-foot woman standing near them (amid bad special effects) who to their joy captures them. This stale stuff could have been done on TV twenty years earlier.

However, the 1970 Christmas special victory overshadowed all the shortcomings of the past months. Bob now held the record for the highest-rated TV show ever and went on emboldened with the triumph. His ratings stayed high the rest of the year, and when he did his next Christmas show on Jan. 14, 1971, he nearly matched what he did twelve months earlier with a 44.3 rating.

Those two shows held the record as the two highest-rated TV entertainment programs of all time until the network premiere of Gone with the Wind on NBC on Nov. 7, 1976 eclipsed them with a 47.7 rating. Coincidentally, Bob hosted the Oscars ceremony on radio in 1940 when Gone with the Wind won Best Picture.

Bob would continue to star on his own specials on television twenty years after Gone with the Wind set the new ratings record (a few other programs would later surpass it). By the time he retired in 1996, Bob had appeared in nearly 300 specials of his own, guest starred on nearly 200 other variety series and specials, shown up on hundreds of talk shows, hosted the Academy Awards thirteen times, acted in more than thirty TV sitcoms and dramas, and received more on-air tributes honoring his work than any other person.

Most impressively, Bob did all this while remaining an A-list star throughout his forty-six years on the medium. He entered TV as a superstar, and he left it as one too. It’s a feat that has never been duplicated and most likely never will be. Cumulatively, Bob Hope set unprecedented accomplishments on television that have yet to be fully celebrated.

Until now.

1: Introduction: How Bob Became a TV Fixture

While his biographers have their disagreements, one thing they all agree on is this: Bob Hope made his television debut on April 9, 1950.

Unless one considers his appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show (then known as The Toast of the Town) on Sept. 27, 1948. That was on a network too, albeit just to a few cities in the Northeast. However, it was a guest shot, so it is not really a debut, right?

Oh wait, Bob did the opening ceremonies for the KTLA TV station in Los Angeles in 1947. Maybe that is the one that should count? After all, he did it for his movie studio, Paramount, and the occasion has been saved on film. Then again, it was only a local appearance, so maybe not?

There is one more claimant here. Sometime between August and November 1932, Bob joined his fellow vaudevillians Lulu McConnell and Willie Howard to appear before the experimental TV station W2AXB in New York City. Given the intense heating of the lighting and need to stand carefully to be seen with just one camera, it is no wonder that Bob delayed doing another appearance in the medium for fifteen years.

In any event, let’s go with 1950. By then, Bob was feeling pressure to take part in the medium because Milton Berle, a comedian who never had success in radio, suddenly became TV’s biggest superstar and began challenging Bob’s status as America’s favorite comedian. It is not like Bob needed the money to do television either — both Time and Newsweek labelled him a millionaire by 1949, the equivalent of more than $10 million in 2017.

The real reason was that it was virtually the only facet of the entertainment industry he had yet to conquer within his first fifty years of life. Born on May 29, 1903 in England, he was christened Leslie Townes Hope, the fifth of six sons born in his family. The brothers born immediately before and after him, Jack Hope and George Hope respectively, would later work for him on TV.

Bob moved with his family to Cleveland, Ohio, when he was four, as his father hoped to find more opportunity for them there. Growing up, he got tired of being teased for his name and adopted the more American-friendly moniker of Bob Hope by the time he was a teenager. After an abortive amateur boxing career calling himself Packy West, Bob began dancing and singing for pennies on Cleveland street corners by the early 1920s. Intrigued by the stage, he finally made a go of it professionally there in 1923, teaming with Lloyd Lefty Durbin to do a comedy and dance act as part of the show for comedian Roscoe Fatty Arbuckle in Cleveland. Arbuckle liked what the duo did and recommended them to vaudeville producer Fred Hurley, who set them up as part of his Midwestern vaudevillian revue.

From there, Bob’s career in show business progressed somewhat shakily, as Durbin died of tuberculosis and Bob got a new partner, George Byrne. They did well enough that by 1927, they broke into Broadway as a featured act as part of a musical called Sidewalks of New York. Near the end of that year, Bob went solo and had an increasingly successful career as a vaudeville emcee before winning a supporting role in a Broadway musical called Roberta in 1933, which contained a song that became a standard, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.

Bob got three more Broadway shows under his belt through Ziegfeld Follies of 1936, where he received praise as the comic highlight of the revue. After it ended in 1937, Bob became part of his first radio show, serving as host of The Rippling Rhythm Revue. Shortly after that began, he moved to Hollywood to appear in his first feature-length film, The Big Broadcast of 1938, where he starred opposite Shirley Ross. Playing a divorced couple, the two have a bittersweet love ballad expressing how much they still care for each other, Thanks for the Memory.

Thanks for the Memory won the Oscar for Best Song and became Bob’s theme for his radio series, The Pepsodent Show, which started in the fall of 1938 after his The Rippling Rhythm Revue (and another subsequent series, Your Hollywood Parade) went off the air after a few months in the preceding 1937-1938 season. The Pepsodent Show caught on well in part due to Jerry Colonna, a wild-eyed, manic comic and singer with a walrus mustache who would stay with Hope through TV until a stroke in 1966 and occasionally thereafter, always with the cameras avoiding his disabled left arm.

The Pepsodent Show was a bigger hit than The Big Broadcast of 1938, and Bob did not succeed in movies until the 1940s, particularly when teamed with Bing Crosby and Dorothy Lamour in the Road movies starting with The Road to Singapore in 1940. Crosby became a punchline for Hope for their work together for years afterward on TV, from his singing to his personal life.

All told, becoming an established entertainer was rockier for him than how George C. Scott blithely summarized Bob’s achievements on the 1978 TV special Happy Birthday Bob: He went into vaudeville in 1924, radio in 1937, films in 1938, television in 1950, and rose to the top of all of those fields. He had to fight to get into all of them except TV.

Dipping Into the Boob Tube

By the time 1950 rolled around, Bob ranked among the top ten movie actors in America and hosted a weekly radio show that was in the top ten as well. No one else ever held that distinction, so he was highly in demand to do television, where it was thought his talents would be a natural for the medium.

However, it took some coaxing to get Bob into TV. Hugh Davis, an executive vice president of the ad agency Foote, Cone and Belding, approached Bob in early 1950 with an offer from one of his clients, Frigidaire, an appliance manufacturer, to sponsor a comedy variety special on TV with him as host. Bob said he’d do it only for $50,000 for himself, an unprecedented sum at the time. He received a counteroffer a few days later from Davis to do one show for $40,000 and said yes. Bob eventually agreed to do four additional shows for Frigidaire a total of $150,000.

While there were mixed reviews for that first show, Jack Gould in The New York Times loved it, and his rave review was reprinted in trade publications. And it got lots of viewers too. Its full story will be told in the next chapter.

From that debut, the rush for Bob was on. He would appear on the medium as a headliner for an unprecedented forty-six years, despite some critical and popularity downturns. Much of it had to do with his reputation as being a top comedy monologist, a talent with which he used to launch almost all of his TV specials.

The Master of the Monologue

How crucial was the monologue to Bob’s success? Consider an unlikely and overlooked showcase of Bob in his element, the now virtually forgotten special The 1974 Las Vegas Entertainment Awards. Hope killed, as the saying goes when a comedian is on a roll with constant laughs in his set, even though he never starred in concert in Vegas (nobody was willing to pay his high requested fee, even given Hope’s popularity). A little joke-by-joke analysis shows some of the basic principles Bob used to evoke howls.

It starts after some scantily clad female dancers finish their routines, then Bob strides onstage and quips, Thank you, fellows. This slays the audience, as the contrast between what fellows normally do at work and how these ladies shimmy is very distinct.

Bob continues with You know, Vegas started out as a watering hole. Now it’s a milking station. Laughs ensue because those in attendance know how the gambling Mecca does a fine job of milking money from patrons who largely lose playing the games.

This is one of the few places left where you can get three lemons for a nickel, he adds. The comedy here infers inflation while referencing a familiar result one sees when playing slot machines. It’s timely as well as funny, a mark of many of Bob’s best jokes.

The area’s shady, go-for-broke atmosphere plays into Bob when he says, So far, we’ve had to buy the [TV] cameras back five times. So does the town’s reputation for sexual conquests by older men with younger women. He gets applause after noting, We’re coming to you from Caesars Palace. It’s a family hotel. Every guy you meet here is with his niece.

Next comes one superbly constructed joke. Around here, if you see a man naked running through the lobby, he’s either a streaker, a loser or his wife arrived a day early. In one sentence, Bob gets in a reference to a current trend along with previous mentions of gambling and sexual misadventure. This is so tightly written and well-delivered by Bob that he even grins to bask in its strong reception.

More licentious behavior is implied by gags after that. I think I have Caesar’s suite. I found Cleopatra’s girdle under the bed. The suites are really so luxurious. They have mirrors on the wall, mirrors on the ceiling, in case you’ve got a stiff neck. Delivering that last line, Bob gives a deadpan stare into the camera to indicate he really means something else he can’t say, producing more audience hysteria.

Bob follows this with comments that draw truthful, relatable visuals — and therefore hearty chuckles — among the regulars in Vegas. And a lot of women spend all day here playing the slot machines. They’re easy to spot. They’re four feet eleven with arms six feet long. And they’re really weird. Where else do you see a woman slathered in diamonds and mink absolutely ecstatic because she just won twelve nickels?!

He also references both the reputed mob influence and rich payouts to entertainers associated with Sin City. They treat their stars like kings out here. When Tony Bennett left his heart in San Francisco, they sent a couple of boys to pick it up. And I don’t know what they pay (Frank) Sinatra, but he just put a down payment on Australia.

Bob’s rapturous reception continues as he discusses the competitive mood for the awards backstage and indicts himself as wanting a statuette too. I’ve never seen so much swearing and scratching. I don’t have a fingernail left. The desire for such public recognition is a staple of Bob’s comedic repertoire.

He even gets off one joke mentioning the community’s top grossing act along with inferring sexual lasciviousness once again. Vegas has more beautiful girls than any other city in the world. At least that’s what Elvis (Presley) told me when I stopped to see him in the rest home.

Even more material scores before the monologue ends. Bob jokes about his cheapness when gambling by saying, When I’m down three dollars, I look like I’m in the middle of open heart surgery. A few other contemporary references occur too: I use so much artificial sweetener, I now have artificial diabetes.

It’s simply one of Bob’s finest sets ever, and he follows it with great interplay in introducing the presenters. Bob counted on such monologues to set a jovial mood for what followed on his TV series, and they usually were the strongest and best parts of his shows (cynics might say the only good aspect of them).

Part of its appeal was Bob’s rat-a-tat-tat delivery that gave him the nickname Rapid Robert. Only a few other comics like Phyllis Diller, Rodney Dangerfield, Henny Youngman, and Milton Berle could match him, and there were substantial differences. Diller and Dangerfield’s material sounded much more autobiographical than Bob’s. Youngman relied on his screeching violin to punctuate his concise one liners. Berle had an aggressive approach to his audience in getting laughs. Bob almost always had the audience in the palm of his hand. He was one of a kind.

Steve Allen, in his 1982 critical assessment of comedians, More Funny People, credits Bob for knowing how to craft some of the best monologues ever. Like Jack Benny, he has a superb editorial sense. He will sometimes take a dozen or more pages of jokes contributed by some of the best gag-writers in the business, read quickly through them, and, in just a few minutes, select those that are best for him. He would not argue that they are necessarily the best per se, merely that they are lines that he feels comfortable with, that he believes will make his audience laugh.

Sherwood Schwartz, who joined Bob’s radio show in 1943 after writing jokes for his older brother Al Schwartz to share with Bob (Al would stay to do Bob’s first TV shows), astutely recalled how to write for his boss to Jordan R. Young in The Laugh Crafters: Comedy Writing in Radio and TV’s Golden Age. Superfluous words were killed off, immediately — Hope had no use for them. He had a rhythm in his speech, and you learned that rhythm. An extra ‘the’ was cut out. You learned to write bare bones kind of dialogue. No fat.

Indeed, long before the USA Today newspaper set the standard in the 1980s of no more than twenty-five words in its articles’ ledes (opening sentences), Bob followed that practice religiously. He sought the shortest time possible between the setup and the punchline for each joke. Writers who learned that trick would find themselves a steady employer with Bob.

Writing for Bob

From the start of his radio show in 1938, Bob depended on a larger staff of regular writers than other comedians to condense their work into what he thought was the best of each for him to use on air. One radio writer to make the transfer to TV was Larry Gelbart, who joined Hope’s show in 1948 and worked together with Larry Marks as one of six staff writers.

For Hope, this was almost a skeleton crew; in previous years, he had employed up to a dozen or so writers, all working at the same time turning out his material, Gelbart said in his autobiography, Laughing Matters. He learned that Hope expected to reach him 24/7 by telephone whenever he needed help and have as many jokes as possible for his boss.

The monologue process Gelbart outlined for Bob remained fairly consistent over the years. Howard Albrecht, who wrote for Bob in the 1970s, describes the process thusly: A week before taping, we’d get a list of about ten topics he wanted to address for the monologue. You’d write two to four jokes for each topic. We would have thirty-five to forty jokes total. They’d have an entire script of all these jokes from the writers for Bob to review. He would read jokes three times to see if he liked them. He’d end up with thirty to forty jokes.

By the 1960s, Bob read those jokes before a studio audience for forty minutes. Typically these audiences were ones held over from a taping of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson in Burbank, California, when Carson moved the show there permanently in 1972. The folks in the audience were usually thrilled to get treated to an extra added attraction, says Gene Perret, a regular Hope writer in the 1980s and 1990s. Carson would leave, and they would have the bonus of Bob Hope doing his opening gags.

The ones with the best reactions made the seven- to eight-minute set (on average) on the show that aired. Albrecht said he used a little secret when doing jokes for his boss: Bob Hope liked to say the word ‘mukluks,’ so we would work that in when we could.

When it came to shows outside Los Angeles, Bob expected his writers to include plenty of jokes in his monologues about the area surrounding the venue he was playing, whether it was Phoenix or Fiji. Hope had learned from the military shows to tailor his stuff for each ship or base we’d visit, says Robert L. Bob Mills, who wrote for Bob from 1977-1992. We received filled out questionnaires that had been sent ahead in advance. So we had specific names, events, bars, etc., to make fun of.

We had to research the old-fashioned way, adds Perret. I might pick up a book on travel to Tahiti and see the local attraction, but also the color. What drink is big in Tahiti? Where are the hot spots?

Perret says Bob’s production company helped out too. His PR team would call people and get input. They had newspaper connections, things happening in town. When performing before soldiers at a camp, We’d get a lot of input from the military, loose-leaf books about an inch thick with background information.

It could tough for the writers to endure watching their efforts on their monologue during tapings. Mort Lachman, Bob’s head writer and later producer from 1950-1975, commented in a 1961 documentary by NBC News on its Project Twenty series of specials titled The World of Bob Hope that he and his fellow scripters not only heard their jokes bomb, meaning they wouldn’t appear on air, but also Bob coming with something off the cuff that did score with the studio audience. The minute they know it’s an ad lib, they fly off and all laugh and scream, and there we are, sitting in the booth, wondering what we’re doing, Lachman said ruefully.

Generally though, the monologue jokes were strong. However, there were two repeated kinds of material submitted that Bob should have rejected. One was outdated references, particularly regarding TV. For example, even though the character of Chester had been off Gunsmoke since 1964, Bob resurrected him on his April 17, 1969, special on regarding the cancellation of The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour with, It’s the biggest crisis at CBS since someone tried to fix Chester’s leg. Two years later, his Sept. 13, 1971 show, Bob joked that injured football star Joe Namath would be showing up on Gunsmoke as Chester.

The other was sexist references. Consider what Bob said about one female astronaut in training on The Bob Hope Buick Sports Awards Show in 1961: I tell you, women are better suited for the loneliness of space travel. Just give them a telephone and a hair dryer, and they’re happy for years. Of course, there’s bound to be a little trouble when blastoff time rolls around. Can’t you see our seven male astronauts pointing at the dame and saying, ‘Ladies first’? And you can’t blame her for wanting to go. What woman could resist floating around in space and calling her best friend to say, ‘Clara, guess what? I just lost 118 pounds!’? And she’ll have on an anti-gravity garment. I don’t know what to do about that, I know lots of women that wear them. It got laughs then, but it is painfully dated material today.

Other than those considerations, those monologues generally were strong, and Hope’s team enjoyed the challenge of crafting them. I prized the work on the opening monologue more than anything else, says Perret. As a gag writer, that was where I wanted to shine. And of course, we did much more monologue writing than sketch writing.

Sketchy Writing

Most critics and fans agree that monologues on Bob’s shows were much better than his sketches, and part of that can be blamed on the system established by Lachman. For each special, Lachman gave writers the sketch’s subject, outline and, when known, guest stars. Each team of writers paired up would sit down and write their own sketch based on the idea and turn them into Lachman, who’d put the skit together using the best material from all submissions. "This is why the Hope sketches have always been more a collection of gags than a developed sketch, without the consistency, the narrative build, and the characterization of the best of the sketches on Your Show of Shows or later on The Carol Burnett Show," asserts Tom Stempel in Storytellers to the Nation: A History of American Television Writing.

Indeed, without a single writer or pair of writers serving as the original voice of a skit, Bob’s comedy pieces on TV apart from the monologues typically came across as a bunch of asides being inconveniently interrupted by the thinnest of plot developments, with funny costumes, sets, and special effects taking precedence in the humor. Add to that editing for time and inserting reactions during post-production including a laugh track (by the 1960s, most sketches Bob performed before audiences were ones done on location — others generally occurred in NBC’s Burbank studios over a two-week period), and the final product on air often emerged as childish or nonsensical to follow.

By the time Perret worked for Bob full time in 1981, he says the process had altered somewhat. "Writers could turn in completed sketches, and many of us did. I would venture to say that most of the sketches we did were fully written by one writer or one team of writers. It was rare that we got an outline and filled it in. That was a difficult way of writing.

However, once a sketch was written, we might all be asked to contribute to it, or in a sense rewrite it. That’s when some of the conflicts would arise — we’d do various rewrites, and Hope would select lines he liked, and often they weren’t compatible. I do recall one sketch in which Brooke Shields had three entrances and only one exit. Difficult to do. The constant tampering with skits up to the last minute left no one feeling like he or she really created them, thus little to no emotional attachment came from writing them, and they suffered as a result.

Even Perret, who can easily and happily cite several skits he wrote for The Carol Burnett Show despite being on it earlier than Bob’s shows and for a much shorter period (1973-1978), admits that I can’t recall off the top of my head a single sketch that I wrote for the Bob Hope specials that I was particularly proud of. And I never realized that until you asked this question.

Bob’s sketches did have a reputation of being ribald and racy on the air, in part because he had been faded out a few times on his radio show by NBC censors and also because he appeared opposite a lot of beautiful women making suggestive comments. However, most stories about his ability to get dirty jokes through his specials are apocryphal.

Consider one reported incident in Kermit Schafer’s Blunderful World of Bloopers that supposedly got Bob knocked off TV briefly. Jill St. John looks for Bob’s car keys while the latter has his hands tied in a sketch. She tells him, Gee Bob, going into your pocket like this, I feel a little silly. Bob responds with, If you go a little lower, you’ll feel a little nuts. It sounds believable, except Schafer reported this happened sometime in the early 1950s, when Jill St. John was barely a teenager. Bob was sly, sure, but not like this, and he was nowhere near as off color in his humor as most TV comedy is today.

Larry Gelbart admitted that Bob’s writing system could be constricting. We often didn’t — we weren’t allowed to do whatever might have been our best, he recalled to Jordan R. Young in The Laugh Crafters: Comedy Writing in Radio and TV’s Golden Age. We did our best for Bob Hope…but as I said, that was kind of writing for order.

Still, writers who adapted to the system stayed with Hope for years, often decades, even though they were at his beck and call to supply jokes at personal appearances as well as his TV work. Perret says that despite what some critics assert, Bob’s extended work hours did not violate rules set by the Writers Guild of America.

He adds that when there was a strike, Hope understood that if we couldn’t legally work for him, we couldn’t do it. However, after one strike, Hope decided to pay us for the variety shows, which were governed by the WGA, but also pay us as writers for his personal appearances. I — and I think most of the other writers — opted to accept that arrangement. That meant that we could write for his non-TV appearances and remain within the guild rules.

The process worked for them as well as for their boss. It all added up to Bob having enormous success that led to increased clout for controlling his shows, albeit not always for the better.

Bob as Executive Producer

After a few years on TV, Bob acted as his own executive producer, a title few other variety stars ever held on their shows, finding performing and sometimes writing for them a big enough chore. This title meant he had final edits on the shows too, so basically he could take the bulk of credit for them deservedly — as well as the criticism for it, which he hated and believed did not exist.

Talking on TV to Tom Snyder on Tomorrow Coast to Coast in early 1981, Bob said he thought each of his specials had had some element of quality to them. I don’t think your show is ever that bad to call it a clinker, he remarked.

Many critics and even some fans would disagree. For one thing, Bob favored using material in the trunk — that is, restaging some old skits that worked well in the past with slight modifications, which he did even early into his TV career in the 1950s. This indicates a laziness in putting together a show.

Also, while Bob demanded new jokes constantly from his writers, he was not above reusing some he liked in his shows’ monologues or sketches. For example, when he enjoyed the reception for calling Bing Crosby the one-man population explosion on his Dec. 13, 1961, special (Bing had just become a father of several newborn children with his young wife), he decided to say it again just two months later on his Feb. 27, 1962 show.

He also had free range to engage in the occasionally irritating vernacular, such as referring to show business as show bidness and calling the cue cards he relied upon idiot cards. Bob’s use of the latter in skits as well as his monologue was obvious on every show.

The whole setup gave Bob’s specials the reputation of not being as strong as they should be among many critics, and while he could handle not getting Emmy nominations in later years, criticism by trade papers in particular upset Bob, prompting his staff to write letters of protest and even pressure publishers to change their reviews. It was not becoming for a personality of his stature to stoop to such petty reactions, but he did it.

Bob also could be perturbed during the production of his shows, although he would try to hide it from his guests as best as possible. The 1961 Project Twenty documentary The World of Bob Hope noted that his staff knew that something was wrong with the show whenever Bob hummed and that he became angry when confronted with anyone being inefficient and prolonging the recording of a show. Bob truly took the adage Time means money to heart.

Bob the Hard Bargainer

Off screen, Bob had a reputation of being fair but firm in what he wanted from the network in exchange for his services. Whenever his contract came up, Jimmy Saphier, Bob’s agent from 1937 until his death in 1974, and thereafter Elliott Kozak, Saphier’s former assistant, would start negotiations with NBC’s president at the time, then Bob and that president would meet face to face to finalize the deal. Frequently, the contract called for more than just the standard perks.

Every time we committed, it would be every four years…we had to commit to buy a piece of land Bob owned, former NBC President Herb Schlosser told the Archive of American Television. And he owned a lot of land. Tom [Sarnoff, ex-NBC president] told me once that he owned more land than anybody but the state or federal government. He had a lot of land. And we’d buy it, and presumably he would get a capital gain. NBC also bought out Hope’s production company, which was more successful getting motion pictures made than selling series beyond those involving Hope.

For the shows themselves, apart from working with the writers and directors on his vision, as executive producer, Bob went after many big names to appear as guests. Not surprisingly, he almost always got them too.

The Big Guest Gets

When Bob did his second TV special in 1950, he presented America’s top crooner, Frank Sinatra, as his guest for the latter’s first time on the medium. It was a big draw, and Bob now was competing with the likes of Ed Sullivan and Jack Benny to be the first to bring stars to his shows.

Among those big names for which Bob succeeded in obtaining their American TV debuts were Bob’s frequent movie foil Bing Crosby (on a telethon he co-hosted with Bob), Fred MacMurray, Lana Turner, Maurice Chevalier, and Kathryn Grayson. Bob secured them largely due to his reputation for excellence as well as his popularity, and he leveraged that power to his advantage often.

One way was that Bob reportedly engaged in exclusivity contracts for some top talent requiring them not to do another TV series three weeks prior to and one week after the airing of his special with them. Only a few others like Ed Sullivan were able to get these demands of guests in writing.

Bob also allowed some input from his creative team regarding guests, says longtime writer Bob Mills. We’d have one meeting when suggestions for guests could be made. We thought up sketch ideas first and tried to book guests who would be good in them. Bob always picked the guests. He’d take suggestions, but it was always his call, never the producer’s.

Truth is, Bob had several sources from which he got his guests, beginning with those who were hot at the time his specials were recorded.

The Newsmakers

When astronaut Neil Armstrong joked on Dean Martin’s Celebrity Roast of Bob Hope in 1974 that Bob’s mantra in booking guests was Exploit anybody in the news, there was a lot of truth to it. Bob had of course got Armstrong to tour with him on his USO Christmas tour shortly after Armstrong had walked on the moon, and he also convinced Olympic swimmer Mark Spitz to make his TV acting debut with him just a few months after the latter won multiple gold medals for a high rating. If you were an athlete who accomplished a big win recently, a call from Bob would be coming soon.

Such was the case for George Foreman, who heard from Bob’s office about doing a guest shot almost immediately after he defeated Joe Frazier for the heavyweight championship in boxing on Jan. 22, 1973. They told me, ‘We can only pay you ten thousand dollars,’ he recalls. I had never had anything like that!

Bob had Foreman act as his bodyguard on a sketch as well as talk to him before the special ended. Foreman had a reputation of being surly to intimidate his opponents, but Bob told him, I want you to be funny and encouraged Foreman to show a lighter side of himself. It went so well that he came back after defending his title against Ken Norton in 1974.

He opened up a whole new world for me in television to be more than a boxer, Foreman says. He also credits Bob for encouraging him to adopt a new public demeanor of being easygoing and playful in conversation to this day, noting that I never had a serious conversation with him. He could actually pull funny out of anyone.

The Up-and-Comers

Another type of guest Bob sought were promising young stars to book on his show. If they were attractive females, so much the better. Blonde Gloria Loring had been a frequent singer on TV variety and talk shows when Bob asked her to join his USO Christmas tour in 1970. He made her feel right at home as they appeared before several audiences of thousands of military men.

Here I was, this young singer, I was probably in my late twenties, and I was waiting for one of us to go on, and he said, ‘You look great! Have you had everything lifted?’ Loring laughs. She adds, He was gracious to all of us, he was funny and lighthearted. I think you can always tell a lot by a person at the top by the atmosphere you are working, and the atmosphere was one of respect.

Bob adored working with Loring so much that he had her as his opening act on a few appearances plus as an occasional guest star on his shows into the 1990s. She credits him for giving her great advice on handling autographs requests as well: "He said, ‘Always keep moving. If not,